Recipes Lifestyle and Tips

I was just reading some fun facts about chocolate in the hope of getting some interesting content to grab your attention, dear readers. There is a lot of quirky facts like the one that says that Emperor Montezuma II drank 50 cups of chocolate a day (WOW) or the fact that Quaker Oats sponsored the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to promote their Wonka Chocolate Bar and that is the reason why the book and the movie have different names (The book is actually called Charlie and The Chocolate Factory).

However the one that really caught my eye was this: A 2004 study in London found that 70% of people would reveal their passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar.

What the hell!! are we that stupid as a species? Apparently we have not evolved a lot since swapping mirrors for gold on the beaches of South America or getting distracted with bananas. It made me chuckle though… chocolate is pretty enticing as a prize and personal online security is surely over valued…isn’t it?

Do not worry though, I am asking for nothing in exchange for this chocolate recipe and as per this blog’s custom, it has been stripped of all nasties and converted into something that you can serve at a children’s party and then take the leftovers to enjoy with a cup a of tea once everyone has left. Delicious, beautiful and wholesome, it is made with wholemeal flour, a couple of extra bits of fibre, low impact sugar and lower fat alternatives but just as delicious as it should be.

I hope you enjoy it.

Ingredients

For the cake

200g wholemeal flour

25g oat bran

200g birch sugar/xylitol

85 g pure cocoa powder

1½ tsp baking powder

1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 organic, happy eggs or 2 flax eggs

250ml oat milk (or any milk, to your tasting)

125ml sunflower oil

2 tsp pure vanilla extract

250ml hot water

For the icing:

200g dark sugar free chocolate

200ml reduced fat double cream

How to…

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease and line a 20cm cake tin.

For the cake, mix all the ingredients into a mixing bowl except the boiling water. Beat the mixture until smooth and well combined. Now add the hot water to the mixture, little by little until completely combines. The resulting batter will be quite liquid. Leave to set for 10 minutes.

Bake for 40 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. You might have to cover the top with foil half way to avoid it from burning. Remove the cake from the oven and allow to cool completely in the tins.

For the chocolate coverage, heat the chocolate and cream in a pan on low heat or au bainmarie until the chocolate melts. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk until smooth, glossy. Set aside to cool for 1 hour so it is not too liquid.

Take the cake out of the tin, with a long round bladed knife cup it in half and separate the two carefully. Spread the icing over the top of the bottom half of the cake, then put the other one on top and pour the rest over the top. You can work on your drops to make it look more artistic. Leave to cool and the chocolate icing to harden and then decorate with fresh figs and mint leaves before serving. Edible flowers are always a plus.

It is ironic how the language is sometimes a better historical trail than carbon 14 readings. I cannot get my head around the moment in which the human beings came up with the sentence “one apple a day keeps the doctor away”.

Apples belong to the botanical genre Malus. Malus is the latin root that means “not good” and it gave origin to many wonderful words such as maleficent and malefic in English but also to the word mal (evil) in Spanish. It is in origin an Asian tree and as a fun fact for the day, it did not exist in America until the colonist took it there. There are many different varieties of apple trees and apple and its history is long and twisting, from being the forbidden tree to the inspiration for the original theory of Gravity by Sir Isaac Newton.

It’s darker character made it the vessel for the poison in Snow White’s tale and the bright red color of some variants make it perfect to represent temptation. Granny Smith, an Australian old lady bred a particularly sour one. Golden Delicious lives up to its name and there are a myriad of wild unchartered types to be found in small orchards.

They are long lived fruits, they last months in a dry clean place and for that reason they were kept during the winter months in barrels, getting wrinkles and a bit drier with the weeks passing by and still sweet and full goodness. Malus, if you ask me, doesn’t quite make them justice.

If like me, you have left your apples for too long and they start to be a bit wrinkly, this is what you can do with them.

For the dough, mix all the ingredients in a bowl and knead until you get a ball of dough that is a little sticky but you can work with. Let sit in the fridge for 15 minutes. Take out and divide in 2 or 4 according to your plans. Form 4 discs of approximately half a centimetre thick.

Preheat the over 180C.

Mix in a bowl the almond butter, the apple pure and the cinnamon and cover the base of the discs of dough leaving 2 cm to the end with no mixture. Then lay the thinly cut apple slices overlapping as in the picture. Sprinkle with coconut sugar and more cinnamon.

Bake for 20 minutes or until it looks golden brown. Serve with a bit of low fat cream.

I realised last week that some of you actually read what I write, so I am going to have to start measuring my words! Strange how we project our digital voice to the void and we listen carefully to what the wind brings in return.

I am one of those people that stick a finger in the bottle of Nutella. Cheeky and shameless I scoop as much as I possibly can and i rush it to my mouth to stop it from dripping (which I only succeed every now and then). We all know it isn’t the best of snacks but it is so delicious… If like me, you would like to be able to stick your finger in the chocolate pot more often and feel good about it, you have come to the right place.

This Nutella is vegan, sugar free and high in fibre. It takes a bit of processing time but other than that is very simple to make and takes only 3 ingredients.

Ingredients

150 gr. Hazelnuts

60 gr. birch sugar

50 gr. cocoa powder

20 gr. cocoa butter (optional) or 50 ml. oat milk

How to…

First toast the hazelnuts in the oven for about 5 to 10 minutes, without letting them get too toasted. Then mix everything else in a food processor until smooth and try.

You may need to add some more milk, or more cocoa depending on your taste.

If you have cocoa butter it will make the mix a little bit softer that if you don’t, without it, it will be more intense.

Once you have a smooth paste you can keep it in the fridge in an air tight container for 4 weeks.

You can also melt it au bain marie and pour as a sauce on top of pancakes like these:

It’s been hot today, one of those rare, sunny spells of summer after a gloomy, dark and rainy spring that resembled winter more than anything.

In the midst of acclimatising to a new city, which is again new and lonely, I have been having ups and downs, and to be fair, maybe more downs that ups. It is what it is I suppose, hormones, social interaction, long distance relationships, expectations… those are the worst. Alexander Pope once said that Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed, and he was not wrong.

On that note, if you expect nice cream to taste like Ben & jerry’s well you are in for a disappointment, but if you let it surprised you… it might actually shine for what it really is, an amazing, healthy alternative to ice cream.

It can be ready in 5 minutes and no one should be feeling guilty about having one more scoop of it. There are many flavours you can try, but today I bring you a post workout one. The vanilla protein flavour with blue spiral (for the colour, children will loooove it).

You will need frozen bananas. Buy too many bananas, let me get ripe, proper ripe, and then peel them and chop them. Freeze them for as long as you wish but no less that 3 hours. In a food processor, put some frozen bananas (about one banana per serving) then add 1/2 a tsp of blue majik/spirulina and 1 measure of vanilla protein powder. A dash of oat milk (or any milk to your tasting) and blend. The texture should be like soft ice cream. You can then pour on a metallic bowl and freeze for an hour before serving with a scoop, but I personally like the soft ice cream texture and I eat it straight away. Naughty me!

I hope you have lots of these this summer, and please let me know if you try it!

No sugar, no fat, no nasties… only good delicious ingredients and a great flavour. I will be bringing you other flavours in time but I am sure you can work out the mechanics yourselves!

Not very popular where I come from, making cakes with things like banana and carrot is not something I did when growing up. Now that I have been living abroad for a while and I have been exposed to many other baking styles, carrot cake is absolute favourite cake.

Only a couple of years a loaf style cake caught my attention in a cafeteria, Banana bread said the sign. The bread part is a ruse, non english native speakers, it’s a proper cake. And a good one too! So I started to search for a good recipe and I ended up at the BBC good food site, which quite frankly has all the answers when it comes to culinary questions. I have since adapted it of course, to a sugar free wholegrain version that is a little bit healthier than the original and absolutely delicious.

This is my take on a traditional banana bread…

Ingredients

285g wholegrain spelt flour

1 tsp bicarbonate soda

Pinch of salt

110g butter or coconut or sunflower oil, plus extra for greasing

200 gr birch sugar (xylitol)

2 happy chicken organic eggs

4 very ripe mashed bananas

85ml buttermilk (works as normal milk with 1½ tsp of vinegar)

1 tsp vanilla extract

How to..

Preheat the oven to 180C. Mix he flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and birch sugar together until light and fluffy, bear in mind that if using xylitol this won’t happen as with sugar and it will keep being somewhat separated. Don’t worry, it will work out in the over when heated.

Add the eggs one by one mixing well each before adding another, then the mashed bananas, buttermilk and vanilla extract to the butter and sweetener mixture and mix well. Fold in the flour mixture carefully.

Grease a 20cm long loaf tin and pour the cake mixture into it, then put in the oven and bake for about an hour, for the last 20 minutes you might need to cover it with tin foil to stop the cake from darkening in excess. Insert a pick in the middle to know if it’s properly cooked. It should come out clean.

Remove from the oven and cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before serving.

If you like the bananas on top as decoration, cut one in half alongside and place before putting in the oven.

Waffles are a treat. Back when I lived in Brussels, I used to take the metro every morning and salivate at the smell of melted chocolate when crossing the town center. Truly there is no chocolate like Belgian chocolate. I have lived for years in Switzerland after that and believe me, there is just no comparison.

Back then i was young and wild and when things got out of hand on Saturday night, Sunday walks in the grand place usually finished with a hot, chocolate covered waffle in my hands and a chat with a friend.

It has been years since I ever craved a waffle, but I got given a waffle maker due to my instagram account (happy days!) so I have developed a little recipe to make waffles and absolutely ok thing to have without a shadow of a doubt.

Healthy and legere…

Ingredients (makes 4)

1 egg

85 gr. wholegrain flour

20 gr. coconut sugar/sucralose (for diabetics)

10 gr. coconut oil or butter, melted

How to…

Simply whisk all the ingredients together, heat up your waffle maker and pour in the centre of the mould when it’s hot. Mine is not electric so I turn it around half way through cooking.

Be mindful not to have the hob at too high of a temperature of the waffles will burn on the outside and be uncooked inside (experience talking!!). They take about 6 minutes, 3 on each side.

You can eat with fresh fruits like these ones or with home made healthy nutella, that I will show you very soon 😉